l revival; and her
views were seconded not only by the overwhelming political force of
Spain in the Peninsula, but also by the petty princes who felt that
their existence was imperiled.

Independence of judgment was rigorously proscribed in all academies and
seats of erudition. New methods of education and new text-books were
forbidden. Professors found themselves hampered in their choice of
antique authors. Only those classics which were sanctioned by the
Congregation of the Index could be used in lecture-rooms. On the one
hand, the great republican advocates of independence had incurred
suspicion. On the other hand, the poets were prohibited as redolent of
paganism. To mingle philosophy with rhetoric was counted a crime. Thomas
Aquinas had set up Pillars of Hercules beyond which the reason might not
seek to travel. Roman law had to be treated from the orthodox scholastic
standpoint. Woe to the audacious jurist who made the Pandects serve for
disquisitions on the rights of men and nations! Scholars like Sigonius
found themselves tied down in their class-rooms to a weariful routine of
Cicero and Aristotle. Aonio Paleario complained that a professor was no
better than a donkey working in a mill; nothing remained for him but to
dole out commonplaces, avoiding every point of contact between the
authors he interpreted and the burning questions of modern life.
Muretus, who brought with him to Italy from France a ruined moral
reputation with a fervid zeal for literature, who sold his soul to
praise the Massacre of S. Bartholomew and purge by fulsome panegyrics of
great public crimes the taint of heresy that clung around him, found his
efforts to extend the course of studies in Rome thwarted.[138] He was
forbidden to lecture on Plato, forbidden to touch jurisprudence,
forbidden to consult a copy of Eunapius in the Vatican Library. It cost
him days and weeks of pleading to obtain permission to read Tacitus to
his classes. Greek, the literature of high thoughts, noble enthusiasms,
and virile sciences, was viewed with suspicion. As the monks of the
middle ages had written on the margins of their MSS.: _Graeca sunt, ergo
non legenda_, so these new obscurantists exclaimed: _Graeca sunt,
periculosa sunt, ergo non legenda_. 'I am forced,' he cries in this
extremity, 'to occupy myself with Latin and to abstain entirely from
Greek.' And yet he knew that 'if the men of our age advance one step
further in their neglect of Greek, doom and